


Not His Habit

by l00ps



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, One Shot, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 16:43:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20474270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/l00ps/pseuds/l00ps
Summary: Depressing one shot.





	Not His Habit

He looked at his paintings.

His father used to say that all things beautiful were art. His father was a good man. His old man saw everything in life as beautiful. _Life is art _. The older man would say, “_Once you’re older, you’ll see, son. You’ll see. _ ”, and would pat his head and laugh - as if growing up will suddenly make him realize something. As if he was blind, and growing up would make him see.

It didn’t. Growing up solved nothing. It didn’t make him see things with rose-tinted glasses. It made things vanish though. It made his home vanish. It made his hopes, joys, and dreams vanish. His father vanished, too. The good old man died and left his family alone. 

He failed to see life as beautiful for a long time, so he became a painter. An artist. He couldn’t see the beauty in life so he created things that were beautiful. It made him feel good. It made him earn money, too. Critics gave him praise. 

His inspirations only came from a few things. 

_ **Liquor. Cigarettes. Pills. ** _

** _Liquor, cigarettes and pills._ **

His father left. His friends left. All his older siblings graduated and eventually left. They all left him with bad habits. Guidance left and in came liquor. He took so many shots with every bad decision. Alcoholism at age sixteen. It’s as sad as it sounds, but he was functional and he learned to hide the bottles. It blurred the edges. Blurred life. 

Then old friends left, and so he started talking to cigarettes. He thought he wouldn’t get addicted. See, it tasted like shit. Plus, kissing a smoker was like kissing an ashtray. Addiction only happens to stupid people, right? He was smart. It started with his friends too. It was a social thing, just one or two when drinking. Then his mother died. Shit happened. The only thing that stayed was cigarettes. He tried to quit so many times, but cigarettes became the best part of his days. The feeling of wanting one and then getting one was straight up euphoria. In a world of turmoil and despair, they become his favourite life raft. They make everything better; they make everything that sucks immediately suck less. 

“I’m trying to quit.” He would often say, when talking with ‘friends’. He doesn’t leave home often, and only visits bars and stores to buy things. He earns from paintings, from art and beauty. It gave him an excuse. Artful people were often destructive, right? Recreational drugs and stuff, right? 

He wasn’t always a collector of bad habits, though. He had one good habit before. He made really great paintings because of that habit. Paintings of laughter, love and roses. He used to paint things like that before, but because of that one good habit, he actually felt the emotions. Beauty didn’t feel like a simple appearance. It felt like an emotion. It felt like the children in the paintings were really smiling, their hairs made of feathers and they could really fly in the blue skies even if they were bereft of wings. 

It was almost like his father said. 

He found one good habit, and suddenly he could see. It made him feel the rush of being so inspired that his paintings painted themselves. It made him feel the incredible relief each time he woke up each morning. Heck, it made him feel like the alcohol he poured down his throat was poison, and not the cure it usually was. It made him regret each self-destructive stick of cigarettes, and it almost made him feel pathetic for being unable to quit his bad habits. It made him want to be a ‘better’ person. 

His good habit made him see everything as beautiful. 

_**_Life_** seemed so _beautiful.__

But... 

‘He had one good habit before.’ 

She left, though. 


End file.
